The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)

The Taking of Deborah Logan arrives in 2014 with a documentary crew, a declining matriarch, and the promise of something worse than memory loss. Deborah Logan, her daughter Sarah, the student filmmaker Mia Hu, and Sheriff Linda Tweed all carry the narrative forward, which gives the proceedings a matriarchal spine that some viewers may mistake for a statement. It is not a statement. It is a possession film that happens to have women in the driver's seat, and it never pauses to explain what that arrangement means. The camera rolls, the woman deteriorates, and the audience is left to supply its own meaning.

Once the switchboard line for a vanished physician begins ringing and the French muttering turns to snakes and sacrifice, the film commits to its genre obligations with admirable economy. A Monacan immortality ritual, five girls, a buried body, a mine shaft. The horror is efficient and largely free of editorializing. Nobody stands before a whiteboard to explain the sins of the world. The villain is a dead cannibal, not a system.

The cultural ledger here is thin. Michelle Ang anchors the cast as the lead documentarian, and a few non-white performers appear in support, though the film never asks us to think about what that casting signifies. Deborah's Alzheimer's functions as a horror affliction, not as an invitation to reconsider cognitive difference. There is no queer subtext, no engagement with race, no environmental lament, no critique of wealth, no body-positive messaging. The film wants only to unsettle you, and on that modest errand it succeeds. Classify it as a well-executed fright with no agenda beyond the fright. Refreshing, in its way.